For half a century, the Colorado River’s great dams and the 30 million people who siphon water from the reservoirs behind them have effectively killed the river at Morelos Dam, west of Yuma.
Only when the Rocky Mountains have piled up and melted more snow than the dams can contain, as they did in 1998, has excess water rolled past the border community of San Luis, Ariz., and on to the Gulf of California, about 90 miles south.
“The river has provided to us — to humans — for many years the water to grow our crops, our food,” said Francisco Zamora, who leads the Sonoran Institute’s efforts to restore the lost forests of the delta. The Tucson nonprofit works on landscape conservation and quality-of-life issues in the West.
An eight-week flood began Sunday with the opening of a gate at Morelos Dam, which normally sends the river sideways into a Mexican canal. It will be a watershed moment for cross-border cooperation on the environment and on an increasingly pinched water supply.
The goal is to rejuvenate at least part of a desert oasis that once teemed with life.
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/colorado-river-deluge-to-bring-wetlands-back-in-mexico/article_04fadb97-b46f-5e20-986d-f40f1bcf6890.html